Reading as both a passion and a pose

“Reading was a passion in early modern Italy,…but it was also a pose, an emblem of ‘aristocratic detachment’ from the pursuits of wealth, power, and social connections, on which access to and ownership of books practically depended.” —Catherine Nicholson https://t.co/KyrlZ9rWeo

— The New York Review of Books (@nybooks) June 5, 2024

The opening of the linked article:

“I daily listen to your words with more attention than one would believe, and perhaps I shall not be thought impertinent in wishing to be heard by you,” wrote the Italian poet Petrarch in 1348. His addressee was the Roman philosopher Seneca, who had died nearly thirteen centuries before. Petrarch’s practice of writing to long-dead authors epitomizes—and helped to initiate—the essential double movement of humanist imitatio, the exchange by which schoolboys and scholars across late medieval and early modern Europe formed their ideas, values, images, tastes, and turns of phrase along the lines of an antiquity they were just beginning to regard (but had not yet begun to speak of) as “classical.”

The American scholar Thomas Greene in The Light in Troy, his 1982 study of humanism’s intimate relation to and sense of estrangement from the ancient world, called imitatio “a literary technique that was also a pedagogic method and a critical battleground.” Whom to take as one’s exemplars and how closely to follow them, which models to embrace and which to avoid or improve upon, were subjects of fervent debate. In theory, emulating the best of what had been written fostered expressiveness; “in practice,” Greene allows, “it led not infrequently to sterility.” But as Petrarch’s letter to Seneca suggests, the rewards of imitatio were perhaps primarily emotional: a communion with other minds that fortified readers against the disappointments of the present.